Resources for understanding the conflict

Dave SchulerJuly 28, 2006

I’ve been too busy to post extensively on the latest developments in the Israeli-Hezbollah hostilities but I’d like to draw your attention to some great resources in improving your understanding that you may have overlooked.

The Counterterrorism Blog has been posting masterfully over the last couple of days on a variety of important topics relating to the hostilities. Note particularly this analysis of Hezbollah ground force capabilities. Their posts on the recent Zawahiri tape, too, have been extremely helpful. This post, for example, suggests that Zawahiri may be calling less for Sunni-Shi’ite cooperation than for an additional Al-Qaeda force to enter the mix in Lebanon.

The posters at ‘Aqoul are extremely well-informed and will provide you with a point-of-view on the situation in the Middle East you’re unlikely to read elsewhere: they’re generally uninterested in the partisan interplay here in the United States. Check out this post by Lounsbury on the situation in Lebanon, for example. Caution: he does not suffer fools gladly.

I don’t believe there is any better site for Saudi-U. S. relations or excerpts or translations from Saudi news sources than John Burgess’s Crossroads Arabia. He’s had extensive resources lately, for example, on the Saudi reaction to the fighting in Lebanon. In this post, for example, he quotes and links to a pair of opinion pieces from the Arabic international daily Asharq Alawsat.

Each of these blogs has a very distinct point-of-view and different areas of expertise. I suggest reading all of them for a more complete picture.